These five research-backed insights show why the octopus remains one of the most extraordinary minds in the animal kingdom.

Robyn White is a Newsweek Nature Reporter based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on wildlife, science and the environment. Robyn joined Newsweek in 2022 having previously worked at environmental ...

Octopuses have earned a reputation for escaping from nearly any space, and new research shows their skills are even more ...

The story is familiar by now: Inky the octopus somehow escaped his tank at the New Zealand National Aquarium. Making his way across the floor, he compressed his body into a drainage pipe and made his ...

Among the smartest animals on Earth, octopuses are unique for being utterly weird in their evolutionary path to developing those smarts. Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has called the octopus the ...

By combining custom engineering with behavioral science, Swedish YouTuber Mattias Krantz taught an octopus named Tako to play the piano.

For scientist Dominic Sivitilli, a Ph.D. candidate in astrobiology and psychology at the University of Washington, the answer is under the sea. “The octopuses’ long, separate evolution toward ...

Octopuses are capable of sophisticated tasks, from solving puzzles to decorating their dens to remembering people's faces. So when a company in Spain announced that it wanted to commercially farm ...

An image shared online in December 2025 was an authentic drone picture of a gargantuan octopus spotted in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the new Prime documentary series “Octopus!” actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge spends an hour and a half narrating a story about an octopus named Doris that sets out on her own, falls in love and ...